


swallow the marrow

by besselfcn



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Dom/sub, M/M, Painplay, Whipping, handjobs, mild bloodplay, objects in fic may be softer than they appear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:34:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23779975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: “Tell me you want this,” he says.Geralt growls in that way he does when he’s pretending to be something feral. “I’ve told you."“Tell me again.”
Relationships: Ermion | Mousesack/Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia
Comments: 28
Kudos: 79





	swallow the marrow

**Author's Note:**

> Now with COVER ART! from [bookscorpion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookscorpion)
> 
> Find the cover art here: [Art!!](https://digginginthedirt.de/photos/upload/2020/04/22/20200422161216-c60fff92.png)

“If you wish for me to stop,” Mousesack says, turning the whip over once, twice, again in his hands, “you need only say _stop_ , and I will.”

“If I want you to stop,” Geralt bites back, “I’ll break the cuffs and take the whip from your hands.”

Mousesack thinks that’s maybe a bit rich from someone bound and naked on their knees, but he refrains from telling Geralt that. 

“Tell me you want this,” he says instead. He draws the whip up and traces his hand down the length of it; it feels sold in his grasp, strong and ready to taste blood. He doesn’t know where Geralt got it from. He doesn’t know if he wants to know. 

Geralt growls in that way he does when he’s pretending to be something feral. “I’ve told you,” he says. Head bowed, eyes away. The little Witcher’s playing at being shy. 

“Tell me again.”

Geralt exhales. He clenches his fists; his arms tense. They’re held in a V over his head and bound by shackles to the walls; it makes it easy for Mousesack to see the ropey outlines of muscles that snake all the way from wrist to shoulder. That threat about breaking the cuffs seems perhaps not so empty after all. 

“I want this,” Geralt says. His heavy breathing says the same. His cock, slowly filling, echoes the sentiment. 

In a moment of lust-driven inspiration, Mousesack steps forward and nudges Geralt’s thigh with his foot, kicks his stance a little wider. “Want what?” he murmurs. 

He lets the whip in his hand trail over Geralt’s skin. 

Geralt looks positively ready to kill. Mousesack presses his foot harder against the deadly and powerful Witcher’s thigh, just because he can. 

“Whip me,” Geralt finally rasps. “Injure me. I want you to do it. _Please_.”

Even a skilled Druid has his weaknesses, and Geralt of Rivia saying _please_ is evidently one such crack in Mousesack’s armor. 

He walks around behind Geralt to view the wide expanse of his back. It’s already marred by scars throughout, tracing up and down in angry lines, and Mousesack allows himself only a moment to stare and wonder and think _am I to add to these?_ before he brings his arm back and sends the whip across Geralt’s back with a _snap_. 

Geralt tenses and shouts, body going taut like a bowstring, before sinking into his restraints again. 

He doesn’t say _again_. He doesn’t say _stop_. 

Mousesack hits him. 

He jolts again; the second mark landed over the first, a criss-cross pattern forming across his skin. Mousesack wonders how much it truly hurts; whether Geralt is jolting away from the pain of it or just the sensation, the knowledge that the blow carries with it some kind of release that Mousesack doesn’t even pretend to understand.

He knows there are people who do this sort of thing--for fun, for hire. He’d never thought of himself as one of them, until Geralt had approached him that morning in his study, shut the door behind him, and said _I’ve a favor to ask of you._

He wonders how desperate Geralt is, that he would ask.

Then he raises the whip and cracks it down across Geralt’s back again, and he doesn’t wonder anything at all. 

It becomes rhythmic; a kind of soothing repetition like practicing rites or copying out runes. Mindless, but important. Something to be drilled into the core of him, until he could do it in his sleep. 

He’s careful not to bring the whip down twice in the same place; he leaves stripes up and down Geralt’s back until it’s a thick hatch of rising red welts, until he doesn’t have clean skin to bring it down upon anymore. But Geralt is still there, heaving and breathing evenly, and he hasn’t said _stop_ or even looked like he’s thinking of doing so.

Mousesack brings the whip down across his shoulders and watches the skin split sickening over the muscle, the blood well to the surface. Geralt punches out a hiss between his teeth; he rolls his shoulders. 

Another hit; this one splits two seams at once, the blood pouring more freely now, a sluggish too-deep red. Geralt’s head drops, lolls. Mousesack thinks he actually sees his shoulders _relax_. 

“Do you want me to stop?” Mousesack asks, even as he knows the answer.

“No,” Geralt begs. There’s no other word for it. 

He strikes him again, carefully. This one doesn’t break skin; he does it again, and a spot of blood wells up. Each time it does Geralt breathes, panting open-mouthed like he’s been waiting this entire time to suck in a deep enough breath. Maybe he has. Maybe that’s why he asks for this--to breathe.

“Three more,” he warns, because despite what he’s been doing the last dozen or so minutes, he doesn’t actually relish the sight of making his friend bleed, regardless of how much said friend seems to want-and-or-need it. 

Geralt growls in his chest, but he doesn’t fight. 

One.

The whip cracks across two welts already split open, bites deeper into the flesh there. It comes away stinging pink with blood and Geralt grunts, as close to a sound of genuine pain as Mousesack has heard him make so far.

Two.

No skin broken this time, but a new angry welt, settled just between two others. It’s wide, and angry, and it awakens something in Mousesack, seeing this new injury laid on top of all the rest, refusing to break the skin. 

Three.

He brings the whip down as hard as he can, no holding back or repositioning, no care for where it lands. It splits open from base to tip, carving a long line across Geralt’s back, and Geralt _shouts_ , a breathy and needy sound a man usually only makes when he’s coming, and oh, Mousesack would very much like to hear what it does sound like when he’s coming, and before he can think better of it he drops to his knees behind Geralt and takes Geralt’s hardened cock in his hand.

Geralt stills, frozen in a way that only something not quite human can manage. Mousesack thinks he doesn’t even blink.

“You can still tell me to stop,” he reminds him, mouth pressed to the lobe of his ear.

Geralt sucks in a breath. Then another. “I could still pull the chains from the walls,” he says, though his voice sounds shakier than before.

“You could,” Mousesack observes, and he starts stroking Geralt with a careful and practiced hand.

The last time they’d done this it had been different. Different enough that Mousesack isn’t sure that what they’re doing now qualifies as the same _thing_ \--it’s a far sight from Geralt laid up at the castle after a particularly gruesome and drawn-out contract that slipped into a particularly gruesome and drawn-out winter, the two of them getting cordially drunk on wine from Mousesack’s personal store and Geralt sucking him off on the floor of his bedchambers. It happened a few other times, that winter, neither of them under any illusions that it would last past then, or that they even necessarily wanted it to. At the first sign of thaw Geralt had left, and sent letters only once in a very long while. 

And now here he’d come again, rolling through with the plague, all knotted tension and coiled want. Not for Mousesack, specifically, but the things he offered. The places he was willing to go. 

“You’re tensing again,” Mousesack tells him. He puts a hand on his shoulders, skates a rough hand down the thread of a welt across his spine. “ _Relax._ ”

Geralt throws his head back and groans, that guttural noise again, and Mousesack drags it out of him inch by inch.

Soon Geralt’s breathing hitches and his hips start to buck, ever so slightly. Mousesack keeps up the pace, twists his wrist, waits for the right moment--and then he pushes his thumb into an open wound that lays across Geralt’s shoulder blade, feels it slippery and wet with blood and keeps _going_ , until he knows he’s done some real damage and Geralt moans, openly, and spills over Mousesack’s fingers. 

They breathe, heavy, in the dark.

“You can —” Geralt starts, and then pauses. “You can as well.”

Mousesack is too tired, too _achingly hard_ to argue. He reaches into his breeches and doesn’t bother even pulling them off, just rests a forehead against Geralt’s shoulder as he brings himself off. It only takes a minute or two; every time he needs a jolt of encouragement he brushes his fingers, still wet with blood, over the back of Geralt’s neck and feels the shuddering goosebumps that crawl across Geralt’s skin. 

He pulls a rag from his pockets and cleans himself best he can, then he sets to work with Geralt. He snaps his fingers to release the chains; they pull themselves gently from the wall and float down to the floor, bringing Geralt’s arms with them. Geralt breathes a litlte heavier, but makes no other sound, even as Mousesack can hear his shoulders groan and crack.

“Here,” he says. He pulls from Geralt’s pouch a healing potion. “Have some.”

“Don’t need it,” Geralt growls. His fingertips are resting on the stone, his back bowed. He’s not lying; some of the first wounds Mousesack had dealt already look like they’re receding back into the skin. 

“Didn’t say you did,” Mousesack fires back.

Geralt glares at him. Like a cornered little cat. 

He takes his medicine. 

“Good,” Mousesack says. “Now to bed.”

Geralt narrows his eyes. “Excuse me?”

Mousesack smirks. “What sort of lay do you think I am?” he asks. “I won’t simply leave you to your post-coital bliss on the floor of a dungeon. To bed, my dear witcher.”

Geralt scowls, but he drops his head again, like he did when he finally let go. 

Some part of Geralt wants this, Mousesack realizes. _This_. The afterwards. Maybe not with him, and maybe not now, but he craves it desperately. 

He shoves the thought away as violently as it had arrived.

Geralt pushes himself up off the floor by inches. “I’m not your witcher,” he says. Petulant as ever.

“Well,” Mousesack says as he holds out an arm, allows Geralt to steady himself on it. “This is Queen Calanthe’s castle, and I am Queen Calanthe’s advisor, which means effectively, in all the ways that matter, it is _my_ castle. And the things contained in the castle belong to the castle owner, ergo, as a matter of principle... I do believe you are _my_ witcher.”

“You’re a pain in _my_ ass,” Geralt grumbles.

Mousesack smiles. “Maybe next time, Geralt,” he says, and leads him up the stairs to bed. “Maybe next time.”

**Author's Note:**

> Tittle is from clipping.'s Body and Blood because, idk, I feel like Mousesack would enjoy alt hip hop.
> 
> Find me on twitter [@besselfcn!](https://twitter.com/besselfcn/status/1252783833247817729)


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